Ji Li Associate Professor Rutgers Law School has posted the folowing
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2469454
The paper is an expansion of the work published in an earlier law review paper titled “Does Law Matter in China?”. Since then I have managed to collect a lot more data (spanning ten years) and examine all the three legal tools employed by the central government to tackle a critical threat (death penalty, SPC-SPP interpretation, and statutory upgrade).
It may be of interest to members on this list whose research touches on the central government’s use of legal tools to govern, lawmaking and law enforcement in China, the SPC, capital punishment, criminal law, and energy law. Below please find the abstract. Comments are welcome.
Abstract:
How and how well do authoritarian states rule by law? Extant literature does not fully answer these questions. By analyzing a unique set of time series data and archives in a limiting case, this paper investigates a variety of legal measures implemented by the Chinese government in response to a critical threat — pipeline vandalization. It finds the Leviathan has followed rudimentary legal procedures in tackling the threat. And over time it tried the death penalty, formal judicial guidance, and the revision and upgrade of substantive rules. The findings of this study cast doubt on the alleged deterrent effect of capital punishment. Moreover, it finds the supreme judicial bodies to be ready servants of the state’s core interests, yet their service adds marginal value as legal dynamics at the local level are shaped mainly by the power distribution of relevant local parties. Furthermore, the statutory upgrade, does not benefit, and may even harm, pipeline safety. As the statute codified the status quo of the bargaining between the oil SOEs and the local governments, statutory allocation of primary protective responsibilities to the former might have relieved the latter from active participation in pipeline protection that is essential to preventing oil thefts. Findings from this research contribute to the literatures on Chinese law and politics, capital punishment, and the rule by law in authoritarian regimes.
